If the cvs snapshot of BibleTime 1.4.2_pre1 ebuild was taken from head, it would be properly called 1.5pre. Additionally, there are some issues with cvs currently, such as the possibly not displaying commentary, lexicon, devotional keys which means that these module types can't be bookmarked. (this bug depends on when the sword cvs snapshot was taken. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Oh yeah, I forgot. Depending on how recent the sword-cvs snapshot is there is now an internal ftplib install manager method (meaning that curl is no longer required as a hard dependancy)
The snapshots were required because of numerous code changes that made sword compatible with the newest stable versions of gcc in portage. You are correct on the misnumberring, but it will have no effect when bibletime 1.5 is fully released, which will hopefully be soon. Let's keep it like it is right now and things will straighten out when 1.5 final is released by the upstream developers.